Meeting Jimmie Rodgers: How America's Original Roots Music Hero Changed the Pop Sounds of a Century

In Meeting Jimmie Rodgers, the first book to explore the deep legacy of The Singing Brakeman from a twenty-first century perspective, Barry Mazor offers a lively look at Rodgers' career, tracing his rise from working-class obscurity to the pinnacle of renown that came with such hits as Blue
Yodel and In the Jailhouse Now. As Mazor shows, Rodgers brought emotional clarity and a unique sense of narrative drama to every song he performed, whether tough or sentimental, comic or sad. His wistful singing, falsetto yodels, bold flat-picking guitar style, and sometimes censorable
themes--sex, crime, and other edgy topics--set him apart from most of his contemporaries. But more than anything else, Mazor suggests, it was Rodgers' shape-shifting ability to assume many public personas--working stiff, decked-out cowboy, suave ladies' man--that connected him to such a broad public
and set the stage for the stars who followed him. In reconstructing this far-flung legacy, Mazor enables readers to meet Rodgers and his music anew-not as an historical figure, but as a vibrant, immediate force.


Author: Barry Mazor
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 03/13/2012
Pages: 386
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.10lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.00w x 1.10d
ISBN: 9780199891863

About the Author

Barry Mazor has been writing about American music since the 1970s. A long-time senior editor for the roots and pop music magazine No Depression, he writes frequently on country and pop music for The Wall Street Journal.

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